User blog:Semerone/Playing Vajura Fight - Part 2

Introduction
Hello, dear fellow wikians and friends!

This is my second blog regarding Vajura Fight and the third blog in my "The missing Games blog" series!

You can find the previous two entries via these links:


 * 1) The missing Games blog - Part 1 - Getting some new games and the corresponding consoles
 * 2) The missing Games blog - Part 2 - Notes regarding Kishin Douji Zenki (Game Gear)

About "The missing Games blog - Part 3"
The missing Games blog - Part 3 - Playing Vajura Fight is about exactly that, my latest experiences regarding the continuation of my NORMAL difficulty playthrough of Kishin Douji Zenki FX - Vajura Fight.

As this is the continuation of my previous, Vajura Fight related entry, it doesn't start at the beginning of the game, but with me fighting and beating Endoku. Also, I took the chance to get my first experiences of playing as Chiaki and Kishin Zenki in this game.

More about my adventure can be read in the next section of this article.

February 25, 2018
Hi, guys!

Yesterday, my old hard drive broke. But don't worry. I have backups.

So, I went and bought a replacement and restored my backup over to the new drive. It took me from 5 PM till 3 AM in the morning, but it was totally worth it.

My new hard drive is doing great and I decided to celebrate the successful restoration of my data by playing some Vajura Fight!

Today, I decided to play as Chiaki and beat Endoku and Shoukouga with her. Playing as Chiaki turned out way different than playing as Chibi Zenki, as I needed to keep my distance to the enemies, as Chiaki's main attack is shooting violet fireballs at her foes!

So far, I managed to get her to shoot fireballs, throw enemies and temporarily summon Kishin Zenki to help me out by using the bracelets dropped by Miki Souma. Both Souma and Zenki have been very helpful. The former drops health restoring food, bracelets and 1-ups, while the latter takes off 1/3 of the boss health bar by using his Vajura Beam Exorcism move!

But unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to get Chiaki to perform her other moves yet, so I couldn't get her to punch foes with her fists, slap them with a fan or kick them.

Then I turned off the game. Later continued playing as Chibi Zenki and fought my way through a train full of undead skeleton people while getting harrassed by Gahekiyou's ghost!

Once I finished fighting my way through the train, I faced the real Gahekiyou and got to play as Kishin Zenki for the first time!

At first, I had to get used to playing as Chiaki and lost a lot of health against Endoku in his first encounter, but later I thought the game was a bit too easy for me on NORMAL.

I mean, I am a hardcore gamer and used to really difficult games and enjoy playing on the hardest difficulties a lot. So I got the thought the game was would be too easy, because I was only playing on NORMAL instead of giving HARD difficulty a shot.

But this changed when I fought Gahekiyou as Kishin Zenki. The fight went very balanced until both Gahekiyou and myself had very little health left. He was actually quite challenging!

Then he killed Zenki, because Gahekiyou has some kind of attack where he shots small blue fireballs at you. These trap and hurt you and appearantly can't be blocked. So, I lost quite a lot of health because of them and got killed by a scythe to the face.

Then I returned as Chibi Zenki and took off Gahekiyou remaining health, which was only like 7/8th of his health bar.

Amusingly, my initial loss against Gahekiyou was my very first death in Vajura Fight.

In general, the controls in the Zenki games are so fluid, that dying is mostly the player's fault for not knowing how to deal with an enemy or a boss or even the controls themselves, so I only died like a handful of times back when I was playing through Battle Raiden and Den Ei Rai Bu and don't think it will be much different for Vajura Fight. (unless later bosses have cheap tricks like Gahekiyou's "flame wheel"/"willow whisp"-mixture of an unblockable attack up their sleeves, that is)

So continued playing through the next stage, which had some woman talking to me and mocking Zenki while I was navigating through sewers with surpringly clean, blue water.

After fighting some pink mermen, I encoutered Gairinzan. She was a weird Hyouijuu woman, who looked like a large, indigo worm with a yellow belly made of blobs (her body is sprited in a similar way to Anjura's naga form from Battle Raiden).

Gairinzan had a dragon-like head with a human head on top of it (a woman with violet hair and a pony tail) and arms attached to the dragon-like head. She was wielding swords and greeted me by spitting an orange fireball, that was larger than Chibi Zenki himself at his face!

After she jumped into my face and smacked her swords into it, Miki Souma came along and dropped another bracelet to help me out. Then I became Kishin Zenki and hit Gairinzan (the fish/dragon woman) in the head, paused the game and turned it off.

Maybe, I will continue playing later.

Back when I did Razurou trick, I got myself 9 credits and practiced a bit at the wrecked train. It is funny how Chibi Zenki is able to peform all kinds of melee combat moves when you press different button combinations.

He can do a variety of punches and kicks, but with him being Chibi Zenki, I obviously wasn't able to practice his special attacks yet, as unlike his true form, he doesn't seem to be able to use them when he is small. (this again, makes the game similar to Battle Raiden, where only Kishin Zenki was able to perform elemental attacks, while Chibi Zenki was limited to his bare hands and feet)

Playing Vajura Fight was so much fun! :)

I love how it's just the right mixture of not being too difficult or too easy and that it allows you to choose three difficulties, so you can adjust it, if you think its too easy or too hard.

Also playing as Zenki or Chiaki is really different in this game, with Zenki being a melee fighter, while Chiaki plays as a ranged fighter. (this is completely different to Den Ei Rai Bu, which had both Chibi Zenki and Chiaki playing pretty much the same besides some minor tweaks to their movement and attack physics and modifiers)

Maybe, I will give HARD mode a shot later. ;)

Oh, right! Back when I died, I also came across something, I didn't know before.

Whenever you die in single player mode, you get to choose which character you want to play as. So back when poor Zenki got killed, small cutouts of Chibi Zenki's and Chiaki's portraits from the character select screen appeared and I could have continued my fight against Gahekiyou as Chiaki, if I wanted to.

Also it gives you a large CONTINUE?-text with numbers counting down (starting with 9) beneath it. I think, it probably uses a similar to other console and arcade "beat 'em up"-games, where letting the counter run out or running out of lives would give you a GAME OVER and send you back to the title screen.

Ingame, the lives are called CREDITS and depicted in the lower right corner of the screen alongside a number, that can go up to 9 if you collect enough 1-ups. (very easy by doing the Razurou trick and being a bit patient)

Of cause, as the game saves every once in awhile, there's never much progress lost and you can always change the difficulty to EASY, NORMAL or HARD and choose to continue playing as Chibi Zenki or Chiaki or both, if you have a friend playing as the second player, after restarting the console and going into the LOAD menu. :)

The features, that allow you to change the difficulty and having saves in a "beat 'em up", that would let you continue your game back from where you were...

These were revolutionary back in the day and still are in the modern days, as of the thousands of games I played and any others, I didn't play and watch Let's Plays of or read articles about instead, these two features are extremely rare with only a handful of games at max. having them.

Unfortunately, though, I was so much into the game, that I forgot to make screenshots, so no screenshots for this playthrough up to 1/3 through the game... ^^'

I will play through it again and make more screenshots later, though, as the game plays very fluid and is lots of fun. ;)

But at least, you will be able to read this in another blog soon, so it wasn't a complete mess for you guys. XD

I also found out, that Kishin Zenki does take way less damage than Chibi Zenki and dishes out more damage to his enemies and that Chiaki is able to chip away the enemies' and bosses' health even if they block your attacks, which they totally can do in this game by the way! Enemies blocking your attacks in "beat 'em ups" isn't a common ingame mechanic either. XD

You can also make Zenki and Chiaki run around by double tapping the direction you want to run into and keeping it pressed. If you are close to an enemy, keep walk towards into them and press the attack button, you will throw them, but enemies can throw Zenki and Chiaki, too!

Also blocking an attack only works if you face the attack and if you hold down the block button too hard, you will be stuck for a moment, which your enemies will cleverly use to get behind you and hit you.

It is quite amazing how smart the bosses' AIs are in Vajura Fight. They have a pattern like the Jushi from Battle Raiden, but combine it with the seed values used by the Anime Sequence Bosses from Den Ei Rai Bu and some actual rubber band reactions of their own.

So, if you perform poorly, the enemy will tend to use the same move more often, while doing good will cause them to vary their moves.

Something similar also happens with the regular enemies, as the mermen for example started to slide around the ground when they got close to Chibi Zenki and also tried to avoid his attacks by doing small hops sometimes. So they have a more basic version of the bosses' AI.

Hmm...

I also got to listen to a few seconds from two tunes of Vajura Fight's soundtrack and they are pretty awesome, so I might record these as well and feature them at the (currently non-existant) "Vajura Fight/Ingame Audio" subpage later. ;)